As Wonder Woman enjoys a comeback, author Jill Lepore explores the feminist roots of the superhero in her book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman.
Photograph: Scribe

What have been the standout non-fiction or fiction reads for you in 2016? Here are a few that have passed through the Global development desk.

Prayers for the Stolen by Jennifer Clement

Jennifer Clement, an American-Mexican poet and writer, lives in Mexico City. In Prayers for the Stolen (Vintage), teenager Ladydi Garcia Martinez lives in a Mexican mountainside village where there are no men or boys. They have gone north in search of better lives across the border in the US. The dirt-poor women and girls left behind in this lawless, drug cartel-controlled land live in fear of the narcos.

Mothers dress their daughters up as boys and strive to make them ugly. One of Ladydi’s earliest memories is of her mother telling her: “The best thing you can be in Mexico is an ugly girl.” That’s because if word of a pretty girl gets out, the drug traffickers sweep into town in their black SUVs and steal her – and stolen girls are never heard from again.

Except for Ladydi’s friend, Paula, who is “more beautiful than Jennifer Lopez”. She returns a year after her abduction, dead-eyed and having regressed to infancy. Tattooed with name of her “owner”, Paula also has a pattern of cigarette burns on her arm – self-inflicted marking by sex slaves so that “if we’re found dead someplace, everyone will know we were stolen”.

Clement’s first-person telling of the story through her spirited narrator, named after the late Princess of Wales, in spare prose delivers emotional immediacy and demands engagement.

Ladydi and her friends dream of escaping their suffocating world of poverty and fear. So when she is offered a maid’s job in a mansion in the glitzy resort of Acapulco, Ladydi jumps at the chance to start a new life. But things fall apart when a misunderstanding leads to her being accused of murder and jailed.

Clement’s dark – and often darkly comic – novel of lives turned upside down by Mexico’s all-pervading drugs trade, though heartbreaking, is not devoid of hope. That hope is invested in resilient and resolute women like Ladydi and her mother. Pushpinder Khaneka

Women buy and sell at the weekly market in the south-western Mexican city of Tlacolula, where women now drive the local economy as the majority of men have emigrated to the US.

Whose Development?: An Ethnography of Aid by Emma Crewe and Elizabeth Harrison

One of my concerns about development thinking at the moment is that some of the more critical deliberating, which involves contextual and historical analyses, is being sidelined by a pseudoscientific measurement approach. Where once development professionals could be relied on to debate politics and culture and provide space for anti-establishment thinking, today you are more likely to get graphs and numbers. Forgetting things is one of the great talents of the international development industry, which is why my book of the year is what I found on a dusty bookshelf.

Whose Development?: An Ethnography of Aid was written by Crewe and Harrison in 1998. What becomes clear on page after page is that the problems modern development practitioners sometimes imply they are encountering for the first time are actually as old as the hills. And the analysis portends what I fear may be the fate of many development projects currently under way. Reflecting on the failures of the 1970s, the authors blame “an overly technical focus on the failure to understand the needs and motivations of the intended beneficiaries”. Procurement officials and number crunchers take note.

Crewe and Harrison pulled together a range of evidence and thinking to challenge the view of the development intervention as “a value free linear planning process”, or “a discreet project in time and space with a clearly identifiable beginning and end”. The focus of development should be, they argue, on relationships and interface.

The self-reflection that abounds in this book is in stark contrast to the development narrative so often pedalled today, which emphasises the beneficence and capacity of the donor/intervener to deliver high-quality change products for a needy recipient. If you’ve ever felt like a subcontractor rather than a partner you will smile when you read phrases such as: “The obsession with scientific method, layout of reports, and classification arguably reveals a quest for symbols of professionalism as much as a rational process to ensure accountability.” Bam.

Much has been achieved in the two decades since this book was published, and there is much to be said for the world of randomised controlled trials and results management that we now inhabit. But let’s not forget the kind of ethnographic insights that were once a core part of the intellectual makeup of people working in international development. This book is a little difficult to get hold of but there are a few copies available online – or, I am happy to lend it to you. Jonathan Glennie

Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi; Upbeat by Paul MacAlindin

I was gripped by a book recommended by Pushpinder Khaneka – if you haven’t already, see his World Library series for further inspiration. Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero (Zed Books) is a classic of Egyptian feminist literature – it was first published in Arabic in 1975, and in English in 1983, but feels every bit as vibrant and relevant today. It centres on Firdaus, who relates her life story from behind the bars of a Cairo prison cell, where she awaits the death penalty for the murder of a pimp. It is a haunting tale, from the desperate cruelty she suffers in childhood through violent and brutal relationships to prostitution, which initially brings her some kind of sense of empowerment. Saadawi’s writing is always lyrical, even when she’s writing about the most shocking of experiences, and she somehow manages to weave a seam of joy into this searing, visceral narrative.

Another highlight was Paul MacAlindin’s Upbeat (Sandstone), the story of a Scottish conductor answering a cry for help in 2008 to create a national orchestra in Iraq. In response to a newspaper ad from a 17-year-old pianist from Baghdad, Zuhal Sultan, he sets out on what he admits is a “ludicrous” mission – putting together an ensemble in a country devastated by conflict, at the mercy of a conservative regime where it can be perilous to be seen carrying a western musical instrument. MacAlindin and his team of tutors and translators endeavour to corral Kurdish, Sunni and Shia musicians – mostly self-taught, via YouTube – into some semblance of musical teamwork. It is testament to the conductor’s passion and enthusiasm that the orchestra begins to flourish, even touring abroad. MacAlindin’s firmly musical sensibilities can seem a little naive – his mission is by no means solely “music as therapy”, and at times he despairs at the ensemble’s level of accomplishment. Yet there are many moving moments, such as when the female players, used to the constraints of what he calls a fiercely misogynistic society, share their elation in feeling the true equals of their male counterparts in the orchestra. Catherine Nelson

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

The world is on a permanent war footing, and the fingers of China, Russia and the US are hovering over the red button, ready to press it if any of the cold war’s tepid battlefronts start to heat up. India and Pakistan are doomed to destroy each other; Bangladesh may not last much longer, and there’s barely any hope for African countries at all. At least, that’s the impression given by Tim Marshall’s rollercoaster ride around the globe, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics (Elliott and Thompson).

This road – and sea and air – trip is divided into chapters on Russia, China, the US, western Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India and Pakistan, Korea and Japan, Latin America, and the Arctic. It is witty, insightful and fascinating, asking: how do you solve a problem like Korea? Why is power all about concrete? Are the young, fragile states of the Middle East conducive to justice, equality or stability?

Of particular interest to students of development will be the chapters on Africa and Latin America, though only Sahelian and sub-Saharan Africa are considered in depth. The problematic legacy of colonialism is covered, with borders drawn by people who had little knowledge of the land or of people whose fates they were deciding. The chapter also touches on the importance of ethnicity and the falsity of the nation state in parts of Africa where borders have divided tribes and families.

The book doesn’t quite deliver on the promise of its title. The maps themselves are little more informative than glancing at Google Earth. The most striking is the one of the Arctic viewed from above, in which the icy land is encroached on by Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Iceland, like a child cowering in the midst of angry adults. The Arctic is seen mainly as a source of potential wealth and potential conflict, and Marshall does not consider in depth the environmental implications of the imminent hydrocarbon exploration there. The changing climate has considerable implications for political geography, with dormant conflicts and tensions becoming more incendiary as pressure on resources – land and water, primarily – increases.

This panorama looking north across Pakistan’s Indus River valley is one of the few places on Earth where an international boundary can be seen at night: the winding border between Pakistan and India. The port city of Karachi is the bright cluster of lights (bottom left). Photograph: ISS/Nasa

In his will of 1725, Peter the Great told Russia to “excite continual wars”, advice that it still adheres to nearly 300 years later. Marshall would have you believe in the belligerence of not just Russia but the whole world, and this makes the book both exciting and rather depressing. There is a sense that Pakistan and India will never be at peace, Africa will never be rich, and the arbitrary national boundaries that mainly western and northern powers drew over the past century will take years of bloody fighting to resolve. Marshall informs us that: “All great nations spend peacetime preparing for the day war breaks out.” This gripping analysis of the world today perhaps doesn’t pay enough attention to the untold millions of people who suffer because of that approach. Penny Woods

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

After years confined to the printed page, Wonder Woman was back with a bang in 2016. So, with a heavily trailered film on the way next year, and the cartoon character’s (controversial) short-lived appointment as a UN honorary ambassador for the empowerment of women and girls, now is the perfect time to explore who exactly is Wonder Woman. Jill Lepore’s book The Secret History of Wonder Woman (Scribe Publications) is the best place to start.

Lepore tells the story of the character’s creation – and her creator – against the background of the women’s movement in the late 19th and early part of the 20th century.

Given her outfit – star-spangled blue hotpants and red and gold bustier – it was no great surprise to find that Wonder Woman, who made her DC Comics debut in 1941, was created by a man, William Moulton Marston. What was a surprise was that the influence for his creation was the growing suffrage movement and the women in his life.

Wonder Woman was a princess warrior from the Amazon tribe, known in Greek mythological for their courage and strength. With her lasso of truth and bullet-proof bracelets, this female superhero would free women from the constraints of their sex, battle injustices and promote peace. Wonder Woman stories depicted the daily battles women faced, and the fight to take an equal role in the world. The philosophy of Marston’s character was pegged around Margaret Sanger’s book Women and the New Race, which argued that freeing women from the bondage of constant motherhood through the use of birth control was one of the greatest and most important struggles facing women in the early years of the 20th century. It’s a struggle still faced by many women who don’t have full control over their bodies. Sanger, who founded what would become Planned Parenthood, was incidentally the aunt of Marston’s partner, Olive Byrne.

Author Jill Lepore explores the feminist roots of her female superhero in her book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman. Photograph: Scribe

I imagine there will always be debate about those hotpants, and the chains in which Wonder Woman often found herself bound still have a whiff of repression about them. And some will always choke at the idea of this character being an advocate for women’s rights. But Lepore has delivered a fascinating, very readable book that offers a new insight into a character I loved watching on TV as a child, but who seemed to fall out of favour as I grew older. Lepore brings Wonder Women back to life in all her messy, feminist glory. A great read. Liz Ford

•What was your favourite read on development or world affairs in 2016? You can leave your thoughts in the comment thread below, or email us at development@theguardian.com